My dad's feet are really swollen. Purple. He's got some sort of sock on, except they don't cover the most part of his feet. They're like something a gymnast would wear—ankle wraps.
But he looks alright. He's got the cradle/holster thing under him, the red, yellow, green, blue loops sticking out at four corners. I've never seen it under him before so maybe they are using a different crane than what Taylor used on him Wednesday.
Loretta is here on B Hall. She's nice. I heard her talking to one of Phyllis Nester's daughters one day. Ann. Their families were friends. They went to Michigan together. Went swimming, played tennis, enjoyed the air. Those were fond memories.
Director of Nursing Rose came in and put one pillow under his feet, to get them off the floor. I added one more. His bed is stripped of its sheets. The housekeeper whose name I don't know (not Peggy) swept in here earlier. Now she's cleaning the bathroom. If I wrote a book about this experience it would be called, The Shrine: One Year in the Hell of a Good Nursing Home.
I smell coffee from the hall. I'd love some. I didn't get any made before I left. My mom had some left in the pot at the house but I forgot to take some.
Lunch is here. Pasta, veggies, garlic bread. It smelled good. I'm sure it is. I'll never know. It'll be better than my Cucumber Worry sandwich. Side salad with egg wedge. Tapioca. I wonder who, if anyone, is eating in the main dining room. Who's allowed in there. Me?
I don't know what my objective is here today; how long I'll stay. I don't even want to go back to Rockingham. Maybe I won't stay. If so I wouldn't see my brother, but he hasn't come into the house this week anyway.
To leave Rockingham out of the day I'd have had to come over here at 8 or so. Do 8:30 to 11:30, then get back to University City to get Hugo walked and fed. That would have been fine, really. But I figured preparing to cook a meal tonight for my sick mother was the right thing to do. To make the effort. I guess my effort is not effortless enough...
Peggy cleans the bathroom next. Mom sends another text telling me to open the blinds, if I haven’t yet. Dad rips into another blustery hacking cough.
I want to know what else is going on in the rest of this place. Dammert. Has anyone died recently? The last five days? How bad is this Covid outbreak? How many staff are sick? But I won’t or can’t venture out.
Peggy is mopping the bathroom floor. CNA Taylor is out in the hall. Her and Rachel. That’s a good duo. He’s in good hands. It was bleak in here Monday. Thin. There was a puddle of piss on the floor when I got here, under his wheelchair. His pants were wet. I took it up with a towel.
Taylor checks in. She tells my dad she’s going to get him up when the floor is dry. Peggy is mopping the rest of the room, where the puddle was the other day, then where the cranberry juice was spilled. She mops with a slight bleach solution. Fine. The floor is clean.
Taylor asks him how he feels. He says, “OK.” But you sound terrible, she says. Peggy interjects, “A lot better than he did, though.” She says this as much to me as to anyone, and it makes me feel pretty good. Peggy is really nice. She has red hair. For a while I had forgotten her name.
I’m in my N-95 mask with blue disposable gloves on. My exhalation fogs up my glasses. My hands sweat. I would love a cup of coffee.
The stingray documentary has been over for a while. Now it’s Christianne Amanpour hosting a world news program.
“Is Netanyahu ready for a deal now?” she asks her guest.
I had gotten a book out of my bag, an old book that belonged to my dad called Zen Buddhism. I’ve had it for three years. That’s the last time he was home, in Ludlow, Massachusetts. His cousin Anna now lives in the house he grew up in, what I used to know as my grandpa’s house. His name was the same as mine except for the middle name. His was Beresford, after a Lord in England. Mine is Brian, after my dad.
Anna had a box of his books that had been sitting in the basement of that house, basically forever. I remember her telling me about books of his, boxes. Was I interested in them. I couldn’t really muster the energy to get excited about them. I was sitting out by my great aunt Elsie’s pool enjoying some downtime during what was a challenging trip. It was June 2021. There was a party for Elsie’s birthday. My brother and I had driven my dad out to New England, in what would be his last Buick…
Last day of February and a beauty. Warm and windy, blend me some of that balm.
He's taking a shower. Or getting a bath. Per Karin. She saw me coming and intercepted. Not just to tell me about the shower but to tell me that, "He's more confused than usual today." She wanted to let me know so I wasn't blindsided.
Many of the days he's been here he's been confused so this should be interesting. Not a surprise to hear, per a text from my mom, and another a couple of days before that.
I haven't seen him in six days. I went to Farm this week. Two nights and a whole lot of bliss. Last time I saw him I wrote nothing. This writing, I fear, has gotten redundant.
I hear him moaning...
Farm, 2.24.25
They wheel him in.
"They got me, John," he tells me in a high-pitched voice. "They're gonna put me down. I been up too much."
"You know where you are?" I ask him.
"Dammert."
"You lookin out the window," I ask him.
He nods.
"Birds," he says. Rubbing his index fingers together, hands clasped, lying in bed now. Karin and another nurse laid him down, with the Hoyer. I could see his red and purple bottom. The other nurse put some cream on him. I'm not sure what her name is. She's not new but newer. Hell of a nurse. Dresses nice sometimes. My dad seems content but he is looking past me, out into the beyond.
"Anything new?" I ask him. "Anything going on?"
But he doesn't answer; just taps his fingers together. Is it Morse Code? Tap tap tap, tap tap dash.
"You hungry?"
No answer. Then he says I already asked him that, which maybe I did.
Now I hear the hairdresser reaming out the nurse for giving someone a shower. The hairdresser is upset because she just did this lady's hair and her family is coming to see her. Cringe. Bless these nurses. They work on behalf of God. Who could ever fault them for keeping the residents clean? Who cares about what their hair looks like.
I turn on the TV. My dad says something about me watching the stock market channel but they don't have it here. A shame. I find PBS Create, for a cooking show, which is what I watched here one recent Saturday for three hours, my dad in bed the whole time. It's peaceful with the sound off. A beeping somewhere in the background on this hall, not insistent, a slow pulse.
I had him up in the solarium 2.14.25, the only time we've ever been up there.
I know he wants me to stop asking questions but I don't know how else to talk to him, and this is all of him I have left. I ask him if he remembers his career, what he used to do.
"I used to, I used to...." he says.
I ask him if he remembers using his phone. He used to use it a lot. He doesn't remember doing that. Printing articles, I tell him, sending them out to people through the postal service, sending out lots of emails. He claims he never really sent out much.
He watches the cooking show intently, left index finger to his lips, rubbing slowly back and forth.
"You know how long you been here, in Dammert?"
"A couple weeks, " I think.
Which might be correct, if dating back only to his trip to the hospital on February 2nd, Groundhog Day, my sister's birthday, a day I was headed to Farm when my mom texted to say he was in the hospital with an illness.
I ask him if he's been having any dreams or premonitions. It's not the first time I've asked him about dreams. I've been having some strange ones. Strong and vivid. Odd. One last night that didn't feel like mine. About a kid worried about his gambling debt. I thought about it and told this kid that he might not have to pay the debt because he was a minor and never should have been allowed to place the bet anyway. Unclean hands on the other side, laches; other party estopped from collecting. I don't know who this kid was. And, no, I don't think he was me. B mentioned crazy dreams the same morning I woke up after some doozies Monday night at Farm. After feeling like it had been a while since I remembered any dreams at all. Stopped writing them down. This is as close as I'll get.
Footprints of a dream
The TV transfixes him. I don't know what else to do. I'll go out and get my salad out of the car whenever his food arrives. Could be half an hour, easy.
I listed to voices from the hall. Evelyn's daughter. Or granddaughter, who knows. I only had one interaction with Evelyn. Her chair was at a chokepoint in the hall. I wanted to move her. Asked nicely then just tried to wheel her a few feet but she put her foot down, literally.
"No," she said, "I don't think so. I'll stay right here."
Another time she didn't want CNAs to take her out of the lunch room. I look back and my dad has fallen asleep, his left index finger still trying to stay awake, to stay up, still pointing.
Evelyn played basketball in college. My dad snaps back, left hand back up to his face. It's her granddaughter that's visiting her, pretty sure. How am I the age of so many grand-kids here?
Earlier I asked him how he felt, overall.
"I feel good," he said.
It might be Evelyn who'd had her hair done—yesterday!—and then got the shower today. A whole $28 down the drain. The shower my dad got seemed to have revived him, definitely worth $28 to me.
Evelyn still has some lucidity. She still talks. I mean, I'd take pure gibberish from my dad. I'd take nonsense, non sequitur, monolog. Anything not hateful, anything not ugly. He said something to the nurses when they wheeled him in after his shower but I couldn't hear it.
"I look around at these two guys," he says, "And I wonder, 'Are they ever gonna be included in something as big as this?'"
The food arrives and Bob looks my way.
"I don't really want this," he says, and starts laughing.
I take this opportunity to ask him about his tattoo. Was it from his military days? He doesn't answer the question. It's the only time he's ever seemed to evade a question, or appearing to do so. He starts talking about his son fixing up houses. "They were small hands but many," he says. Then, "That's one thing I like about this place. It's clean."
I listen to lunch room sounds. One of the CNAs is encouraging one of three Helens (in this case, the mayor's daughter) to eat her food. Helen replies in her soft-spoken manner, "I'd better not. I don't want to throw up here. Everyone will look at me." The only thing she eats is the ice cream.
Then, a commotion from out in the hall, a racket.
"What the...?!" Bob exclaims. "It sounded like about two or three horses or something." Then he sneezes. "Oooh, that one came out fast," he says.
Bob ate the garlic bread, a little bit of pasta, and the ice cream. "Ice cream's ice cream," he says. "But this is pretty good."
I went over to the main dining room and got a plate of my own. Pizza spaghetti they call it. I ate everything on the plate save one pepperoni. My dad ate everything except one slice of zucchini. It's the Patsy Cline CD playing today. Bob knows these lyrics, some of them. He sings along. When the last song on the CD stops playing he says, "So there."
Genevieve, the 98-year-old woman hunched over in her usual windbreaker outfit makes her way out by taking tiny steps with her dangling wheelchair feet, quiet as a cloud except when she catches one of the CNAs on her way out and asks for a Honey Nut Cheerios to go.
"We enjoyed lunch with you, Bob," my dad tells his lunch mate.
"When was that?" asks Bob.
"Today," says dad.
"Oh, ha. Ha ha. Thank you, thank you very much," says Bob.
But we don't get going just yet. It's quiet now in the lunch room. The sound of wind chimes comes from outside, past the glass. My dad is starting to doze off. Bob is picking at his teeth, wiping clean the glasses he lost for a few days last week.
"I think I'm gonna go downstairs," Bob says. "I don't know if I've been down there. I thought I had. I'll probably make a new, or I don't know. As far as I knew, we hadn't used that, or we wished it away. I'm goin' downstairs. Anybody left? Hello, hello. I'm goin' down..."
Bob was talking today. We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.
“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.
I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth. Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced. New brakes. I guess it really doesn’t take that long.
Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.” I asked him what kind of car he had. Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck. He laughed at that idea.
“No,” he said, he never had a truck. “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”
“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked. “Getting up on those poles?”
“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”
Bob was a lineman. He worked for what then was called Union Electric. He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...
My dad slowly wheeling himself away, his feet pulling, scraping along.
“Yeah, he walked him,” says a woman with glasses, another resident. “We were down in our house.”
Mass is on the TV, in the common room of this nursing home. Lunchmate Bob is singing along with the hymn, just the notes.
“Soft smell, the all cough coughs,” says the woman with glasses. I do not remember her ever saying anything before. But I do recognize her, she must eat in the assisted dining room.
“They were asking for the Christmas Day,” she says. “I never heard that one before. Least they’ll give it to the other Christmas. Have fun. We had a little.”
She trails off. I can’t follow the meaning of her words but hers is a musical nonsense language. Lyrical and sporadic, like a strange bird.
“I throw ye in the class now!”
“Hmm?” asks Bob in reply, thinking maybe she is talking to him.
Lillian, another resident, rocks back and forth in her wheelchair. She’s spoken to me a few times, thinks maybe I am one of hers. A lunch will be served in the main Dammert dining room, Dammert being the name of this place, this wing of the retirement community, the last stop on the route, the end of the line.
Bob has gotten an early start on his lunch. Someone has gotten him a bag of cookies. Maybe his wife, who lives over in the apartments, independent.
“I call on the on-derin,” says the woman with glasses.
“Yeah, hmmm,” says Bob, “Mm-hmm.”
She holds her hands tight, clenched and clawed, thumb to index finger, pill-rolling.
“Hmm?” says Bob, “I can’t hear you.”
The Mayor’s mom is also a resident here. Helen. She fell recently, landed on her head. She looks pretty beat up, a gash on her forehead, dark red, purple, dried blood.
“Thank you,” says Bob.
Later, at lunch, he turns to me and holds up just the top half of a hamburger bun.
“This is nothin but bread,” he says, and I can’t disagree.
For most of this year, I have been visiting my dad at a nursing home near Belleville, IL. Dammert, the place he's in, is the skilled care wing of a retirement community at Our Lady of the Snows Shrine. I have kept a journal during many of these visits. It is time for me to begin to type up these Shrine journals. They will not be posted in chronological order. I didn't take many photos early on so some of the photos might be redundant.
JBR.com 